Atiku says northerners need him and not a Yoruba or Igbo candidate.
Truetells Nigeria reports that the Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria’s main opposition, Atiku Abubakar, has asked northerners to vote for him in 2023, and not for a “Yoruba or Igbo candidate”.
“I think what an average northerner needs is somebody from the north who understands other parts of Nigeria and who has been able to build bridges across the country. That is what the north needs,” Atiku said in a now-viral video on the micro-blogging site, Twitter.
This online news platform understands that Atiku who was a former vice president between 1999 to 2007, added, “It (Northern Nigeria) doesn’t need a Yoruba candidate or an Igbo candidate. This is what the northerners need. So I believe I stand before you as a pan-Nigerian of Northern origin.”
Watch Atiku’s video against a Yoruba or Igbo candidate below…
Despite priding himself as “a unifier”, Atiku’s statement that the north must vote for a northerner goes contrary to the public image of a unifier that he’s portrayed over the years.
Contrary to Atiku’s divisive ethnic and regional campaign, Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, on the other hand, continues to charge Nigerians to vote based on competence and capacity and not by regional, religious or ethnic sentiments.
The 75-year-old Atiku will contest the 2023 presidential election against several contestants, including candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Labour Party, Bola Tinubu and Obi respectively, who are of southern extraction.
Meanwhile, Truetells Nigeria reports that Atiku, who was the 2019 Presidential candidate of the PDP with Obi as his running mate, has since 1993 sought five times and failed to be Nigeria’s president; failing at the party primary level three times and twice in the main elections.